Want To Grow Your Audience? Start By Talking To Them

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When I first started writing newsletters, I was surprised at how hard it was to get good metrics on your audience.

You could survey people and learn about their jobs, fields, and stated interests. And if they clicked things in your newsletter, you could gather more information about what they like to consume and what they might convert on.

But figuring out what readers really like (besides cute animal videos) is often a mystery.

In trying to unravel that mystery, I’ve found that one tactic works especially well: subscriber interviews.

I first started doing subscriber interviews at The Hustle and Trends, where I oversaw the editorial team for 5+ years. The idea came from my colleague, Ethan Brooks, who had a background in running communities.

Before we started speaking with subscribers 1:1, we were already soliciting audience feedback in lots of ways, including by:

• Providing feedback forms at the bottom of every email.
• Creating a private community for our most engaged readers.
• Conducting annual audience surveys.

Those feedback loops gave us lots of signals, which we regularly acted on. Here’s how we did that at Trends, our paid newsletter for entrepreneurs, which I wrote about in a December 2020 issue. (Yes, someone actually wrote that they “Luv me some Trends.”) 

While feedback forms and audience surveys helped some, we got our most valuable feedback by setting up small group chats with subscribers, in which anywhere from one to four readers would hop on a Zoom call and give us candid feedback about what they liked and didn’t like about our newsletters.

I found the 1:1 calls the most helpful, as people weren’t influenced by other readers’ views and were less inhibited because it was just you and them. Plus, you could ask people to open the email and share their screen, to show you how they read the newsletter.

At first, the calls were hit and miss in terms of usefulness. It shocked me that some of our most engaged readers didn’t even know the difference between The Hustle (a daily curated business news roundup) and Trends (a long, research-heavy newsletter of business ideas).

People with skin in the game gave us some of the most helpful feedback. I once spoke with a guy who had invested in our company and clearly read every word of our Trends email.

“This last email struck the right balance between accessible and actionable,” he told me one day. “It’s a thin line to walk, and it’s the first time you’ve hit it. Now do it every time.”

As we got better at identifying the right kinds of subscribers to talk to (I looked for people who read lots of newsletters, or worked in media or marketing), the feedback got more constructive.

One of my best calls was with a reader who had her own podcast company. She opened up our Trends email, shared her screen, and immediately started scrolling down.

“What did you think of the intro?” I asked.

“Oh, I never read those,” she said.

For someone who used to spend hours searching for the right message with which to start the email, it was a much-needed wake-up call.

She went on to criticize our section headers, which one of our writers had cleverly named after Drake songs. “I don’t know what that means,” she said.

She also didn’t understand the difference between two of our main content types.

And she complained about how long the emails were — but in a more nuanced way than we had heard in previous subscriber feedback.

We knew our Trends emails were long (3,000+ words), but people didn’t like clicking out of the email, so we kept all of our research contained in the newsletter.

But this particular reader was frustrated because she had paid for something she wasn’t using, which was making her question whether she would renew her subscription, despite liking what it provided.

As a podcast expert, she mentioned that she spent most of her time listening to stories, not reading them.

“I would love it if you made a podcast version of your newsletter,” she said.

It wasn’t the first time we had heard that, but it was enough to convince us to start one, which helped convince her to stay subscribed.

Over the years, I’ve talked with other newsletter operators who have done subscriber interviews — and they’ve been helpful to them, too.

Anuj Abrol, who wrote the excellent but short-lived Witty Wealth newsletter, once told me that he did about 100 subscriber interviews as he was deciding what people wanted his newsletter to be.

Ultimately, the conversations convinced him that they were looking for advice on how to become independently wealthy — not entertained about the world of finance.

He has since pivoted to a more discrete, underserved audience: nurses. But he still loves — sorry, luvs — him some customer interviews.

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